A. R. Ammons - Tape for the Turn of the Year

Also by A. R. Ammons Ommateum Expressions of Sea Level Corsons Inlet Northfield Poems Selected Poems Uplands Briefings Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1973) Sphere: The Form of a Motion (winner of the 1973-1974 Bollingen Prize in Poetry) Diversifications The Snow Poems Highgate Road The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 Selected Longer Poems A Coast of Trees (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 1981) Worldly Hopes Lake Effect Country The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition Sumerian Vistas The Really Short Poems Garbage TAPE for the TURN of the YEAR A. R. Ammons Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.

Copyright 1965 by A. R. Ammons First Norton Edition 1993 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 978-0-393-31204-1 ISBN 978-1-324-00384-7 (ebook) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 10110 W. W. W.

Norton & Company Ltd. 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU for Josephine Jacobsen
and Elliott Coleman

6 Dec: today I decided to write a long thin poem employing certain classical considerations: this part is called the prologue: it has to do with the business of getting started: first the Muse must be acknowledged, saluted, and implored: I cannot write without her help but when her help comes its water from spring heights, warmth and melting, stream inexhaustible: I salute her, lady of a hundred names Inspiration Unconscious Apollo (on her man side) Parnassus (as her haunt) Pierian spring (as the nature of her going) Hippocrene Pegasus: most of all shes a woman, maybe a woman in us, who sets fire to us, gives us no rest till her wills done: because Ive decided, the Muse willing, to do this foolish long thin poem, I specially beg assistance: help me! a fool who plays with fool things: so fools and play can rise in the regard of the people, provide serious rest and sweet engagement to willing minds: and the Muse be manifest Im attracted to paper, visualize kitchen napkins scribbled with little masterpieces: so it was natural for me (in the House & Garden store one night a couple weeks ago) to contemplate this roll of adding-machine tape, so narrow, long, unbroken, and to penetrate into some fool use for it: I thought of the poem then, but not seriously: now, two weeks have gone by, and the Muse hasnt rejected it, seems caught up in the serious novelty: I get weak in the knees (feel light in the head) when I look down and see how much footage is tightly wound in that roll: once started, can I ever get free of the thing, get it in and out of typewriter and mind? one rolled end, one dangling, coiling end? will the Muse fill it up immediately and let me loose? can my back muscles last? my mind, can it be as long as a tape and unwind with it? the Muse takes care of that: I do what I can: may this song be plain as day, exact and bright! no moonlight to loosen shrubs into shapes that never were: no dark nights to dissolve woods into one black depthless dimension: may this song leave darkness alone, deal with what light can win into clarity: clarity & simplicity! no muffled talk, fragments of phrases, linked without logical links, strung together in obscurities supposed to reflect density: its a wall to obscure emptiness, the talk of a posing man who must talk but who has nothing to say: let this song make complex things salient, saliences clear, so there can be some understanding: 7 Dec: today I feel a bit different: my prolog sounds phony & posed: maybe I betrayed depth by oversimplification, a smugness, unjustified sense of security: last night I read about the geologic times of the Northwest, the periodic eruptions into lava plateaus, forests grown, stabilized, and drowned between eruptions: in the last 10,000 years (a bit of time) the glaciers have been melting, some now unfed, disconnected, lying dead and dissolving in high valleys: how strange we are here, raw, new, how ephemeral our lives and cultures, how unrelated to the honing out of caves and canyons: the lands, floating, rise and fall, unnoticed in the rapid turning over of generations: we, rapids in a valley that millennially sinks: nothings simple, but should we add verbal complexity? is there a darkness dark words should imitate? I mean to stay on the crusty hard-clear surface: tho congealed it reflects the deep, the fluid, hot motions and intermotions where, after all, we do not live: 10,000 yrs Troy burned since then: but the earths been restingentering a warm cycle: the Sumerians had not, that long ago, compiled their holy bundle of the elements of civilization, nor had one city-state stolen it from another: ten thousand years: how many Indians is that, fishing the northern coast, marrying, dying? coming & going, they left no permanent sign on the warming trend: I hadnt meant such a long prolog: it doesnt seem classical to go ahead without a plan: wonder what plan the Indians had 10 M years ago: the thought defines our sphere: why should a world be bigger than what a man can reach and taste and strike & burn & hunt & hold? bigger than that is metaphysics which tho entertaining is inedible and unsurrendering: whats 10,000 years to us, blips on radar screens? in the blip is all imperishable possibility: not unity, not all but the full, complete: we can in moments have that but when we surround mind & world to say all in a single word, we kill advantage with the cost of gain: cant we break loose and live? I wish I had a great story to tell: the words then could be quiet, as Im trying to make them now immersed in the play of events: but I cant tell a great story: if I were Odysseus, I couldnt survive pulling away from Lestrygonia, 11 of 12 ships lost with 11 crews: I couldnt pull away with the joy of one escaped with his life: Id search myself pale with responsibility, tho Id be in the wrong: that we cant predict what our actions will lead to absolves us, tho not altogether: were held to right deeds and best intentions: my story is how a man comes home from haunted lands and transformations: it is in a way a great story: but it doesnt unwind into sequence: it stands still and stirs in itself like boiling water or hole of maggots: foam or crust can rise and sweep away into event: but not much of that: mostly inner resolutions, countermotions that may work themselves out into peace, bring the man home, to acceptance of his place and time, responsibilities and limitations: I mean nothing mythical Odysseus wandering in a ghost-deep backgroundI mean only or as much as restoration which takes many forms & meanings: but the story, tho contained, unwinds on this roll with time & event: grows like a tapeworm, segment by segment: turns stream corners: issues in low silence like a snake from its burrow: but unwinding and unwound, it coils again on the floor into the unity of its conflicts: 8 Dec: the way I could tell today that yesterday is dead is that the little gray bird that sat in the empty tree yesterday is gone: yesterday and bird are gone: I know theres no use to look for either of them, bird running from winter, yesterday running downstream to some ocean-pocket of rest whence it may sometime come again (changed), new as tomorrow: how like a gift the memory of bird and empty tree! how precious since we may not have that configuration again: today is full of things, so many, how can they be managed, received and loved in their passing? on the bridle path this morning yellow horse-turds glistened with the moisture of intestines: a purple leaf occupied a busha dozen kinds of lichen on an oak: eelgrass stood straight up on underwater banks: someone told an elephant joke: how do you kill a blue elephant? with a blue-elephant gun: how do you kill a white elephant? with a white-elephant gun? no, you tie a string around his trunk and when it turns blue you shoot him with a blue-elephant gun: a little boy said, Up, up, begging to ride his daddys shoulders, and the morning was warm and winter-bright: from completeness should one turn away? so they drank wine and ate meat and slept: the shores fled under the winds weight: why does an elephant lie on his back? to trip the birds: tonight, so compressed is change, were having warm weather and windy rain: the house, however, smells of fruitcakes baking and merriment curls along the ceiling, giggles down the walls, and tickles the floor: the inexhaustible multiplicity & possibility of the surface: while the depths are generalized into a few soluble drives, interesting, but to be returned from: the crust keeps us: the volcano-mind emits this ribbon of speech, smoke & heat that held would bust the cone off, inundate the house with direct melt: but let off, theres easing, mind cool, the slow accretion of hard rock: doesnt matter how much the core shifts long as we have these islands to live on: were in a solid, hard, exact world that tells all we need to know of depth: art casts into being, the glow-wobbling metal struck by a difference of ice: both necessary: without flow, theres no resource for crust: without ice, no sharp steel: death is lifes prerequisite: this is that & that is this & on and on: why cant every thing be just itself? whats the use of the vast mental burden of correspondence? doesnt contribute to the things resembled: except in the mind: except in the mind: theres the reality that needs to hold: 9:35 pm: lightning! what, in December? just flashed blue-bright and thunder, moving slowly and rumbling hard into deep bursting depressions, went all the way out over the Atlantic: now, will the ground, shaken loose, turn green, loam to new roots? the old people say its a use of thunder: but this time of year, the seeds asleep, thunders sterile disturbance runs dreams through the meat of the future, a prophecy: no, fancy, never satisfied with wonderless things as they are: its the return of air upon itself, following an electrical discharge and separation: the grass seeds, hanging in clumps on soaked stalks, paid no attn & thought of nothing: wind and rain have stopped: the thunder was a gigantic period, punched over & over: or do I hear now a submissive, unwilling drizzle? sequence: events stalled in their occurrence: a running with, fleet recorder at the crest of change: a plane is in this: it rumbles in the distance, a chord through my circular knowledge: it is out in the rain: 9 Dec: sunny again: last night a plane over Delaware struck the storm & 80 lives descended in flames: its the nature of flame to rise, celebrant, spirit to whirl upward: 11111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111 11111111111 and he plucked two men and broke fast grieved, we rejoice as a man rejoices saved from death: we beg that men be spared calamity & the hard turn: we make an offering of our praise: we reaccept: our choice is gladness: give us an idea! let us be sorted out and assembled: let a new order occur from the random & nondescript: let thoughts & emotions fall behind into rank: or return us from all idea to undifferentiated sensationparadise: 1 pm: had the storm last night come half a mile farther east, it would have taken my roof off and wet my poem (and my pants): it had a little twister in it, the man at the Esso station said, came right up the parkway, took off his plate-glass windows, shattered the outdoor movies tall wooden marquee, took the roof off the concession and off the Circle Diner and busted a window in Kinneys: must have been a sucker, he said, lifted oil cans right off the shelves reality last night was more than I apprehended: is far more today than feebleness lets me know: wind ruined several dead weeds and rain de-seeded a lot of grass: the cloud patterns must have been fine, dark roils hidden by rain: I wonder what all did happen? but the record cant reproduce event: even if I could know & describe every event, my account would consume the tape & run on for miles into air: those who rely on facts have not heard: those who rely on arrangementsare sometimes unwilling to surrender them: those who rely on any shore foolishly havent faced it that only the stream is reliable: get right up next to the break between what-is-to-be and what-has-been and dance like a bubble held underwater by waters pouring in: when the grass moves on the hill, its impossible to tell whether it has moved or will move: my mind is trying to keep every cell in my body happy: yes, it says, we understand that you need so-and-so but were temporarily (we hope) out of that and are having a substitute manufactured this will be released to you as soon as possible: be sure to alert your receiving dept: it gets an alarm from a group of injured or invaded cells: we are sending several divisions & several kinds of divisions to help you: and so on: catalysts, enzymes & membranes, functions, trades & forces, the in-coming, out-going: this mind that I turn outwardlyhow thin by comparison the body releases from inner concerns and gives few commands: get food, water, sex: then reality brings its interference in and the simple outward mind, complicated by postponements, symbols, prerequisites, proofs, nearly loses in metaphysics & speculations its contact with the original commands: get food, water: sex is put upon you as the lust of generations: it has been made to seem pleasurable but is subservience to the cry of flesh to endure: the inner mind saysdo that for the cells, for us, and we will free you to the pleasures of the outer mind: get food, get water: sex is a fire we send you: quench it into generations: be brought low of the fire: Ive given up hope of understanding for what good is understanding? understanding what? the conversion of currencies: the multiplication tables: IQ: quantum theory & babys formula and how to replace the shingles & whether to put the money in SKF or Xerox, and the clauses in insurance plans & the political situation: plenty of food & water in paradise but some confusion about sex: anything so sweet should come hard as bread & water: so they were given the gate: and Eden survives in the mind as half a solution: analyze and project: experience teaches but stands to be taught: 4:50 pm: the checker at the A & P said he was returning from Philly about 9:15 last night and saw it: said the sky lit up, he didnt know why till the radio sd later: said it wasnt hit by no lightning: said they have things hanging from the wings: said he thinks it was turbulence, wind turbulencecan take a plane apart: woman said shes been up there & it gives her a funny feeling: one night I saw something come apart over Vineland: it streaked in, glowed, & slowly tore apart: I thought it was a satellite re-entering: but next day read in the papers it was seen from Virginia to Connecticut: too big to land, as I thght it wd in Millville: was no small potatoes: first there was this blue flash: here are motions that play in and out: unifying correspondences that suggest we can approach unity only by the loss of things a loss were unwilling to take since the gain of unity would be a vision of something in the continuum of nothingness: we already have things: why fool around: beer, milk, mushroom cream sauce, eggs, books, bags, telephones & rugs: pleasure to perceive correspondences, facts that experience is holding together, that what mind grew out of is also holding together: otherwise? how could we perceive similarities? but all the way to unity is too far off: we have a place: at dusk a deep blue sweeping smooth cloud mass went just between us and the ocean: but the night is clear and full of stars: 10 Dec: sunshine & shade alternate at 32: winter seems about to, but hasnt quite decided how to happen: (ideas give direction but sometimes the wrong...) when the first horizontal haze of sunlight struck the sumac thicket this morning, bluejay flew in and sat on an outside limb, his appreciation, meditative but imperfect, troubled by starlings: no place to stop: the pure moment self-centered & posed: I heard of a little girl who wrote not poems, but feelingssome tissue resulting from things & feelings at interplay: to make a world we need out of the reality that is and is indifferent: but play removing uswe must be carefula point away from reality, though an uncreated, unspecific realitythat is, in a sense, no reality at all: what is out there? beyond the touch of what we make? whatever, stars shine through it & bring us up short: we make a context that lets us out, permits fullest life: we must care for ourselves, assume that, beyond, we are cared for: rely on feeling till it goes too far: then on sweet reason which recalls, restores, and levels off: we must all die, its quite remarkable nevertheless, true: but breakfast, and getting off to school & work, and what color to paint the second bedroom is meaningful: its no great joy to me that I plunge deeply (I think) into things: eternal significance is of some significance to me: I dont know just how: but temporal significance is a world I can partly make, loss & gain: the social order obtains identity at the cost of certain exclusions: unity by the elimination of difference: the pleasure of the order is shared by many, but the cost falls on a few: should the many be denied to relieve the suffering of the few? should the few pay and not enjoy? if its the few who, alive to suffering, advance the mind, do they have their reward? and the callous many? is smugness the cost of their pleasure? motions of society & psyche: whats to be done? ever been done? greater tolerance of random without obliterating identity? relieve the suffering of the few & enrich the many with difference? if the oppressed are freed, will they become callous and unfruitful? will you have the secure few and the oppressed many? is freedom identity without identity? whos not working, slashing, sweating, devising, cheating to surpass the many and rise into the Few: (only a few who pride themselves on being the Bottom Few?): is the fight for the Top the true mystique? first dibs on food & sex: I know you, man: am grateful to the order, however imperfect, that restrains you, fierce, avaricious: the Top: Olympus, the White House, the Register: many lesser peaks in the range: choose one and fight: thats equality: if inequality, must be a few hills even there: whats the way home? home? whats wrong with these deserts, excitements, shows: excursions: home is every minute, occurring? just like this? man, youre sweet & gentle to those who are no threat to your mt but are evidences that you occupy one: I have your #: its me first after you: Odysseus screwed a lot but never got screwed: or if he did, he screwed back harder, first chance he got: he never took nothing lying down: my songs now long enough to screw a right good-sized article with: flexible to vault me to the Top: I hope it will lift me into your affections: thats what I need: the top Ive chosen, the mt I wd climb: the nest Ive provided for this song to wind into is the wastebasket: thats symbolic: the roll, tho, unwinds from the glazed bottom of an ashtray: I dont know what to make of that: phoenix? why always make something out of everything? maybe this song will be about getting home and figuring out some excuse to leave again: that wd be gd bth cmng & gng: the clouds, continuous, are creased with light between furrows: like a forehead, opposite with shadow: just sat down to smoke, and the sun cast my hand against the wall, and my cigarette, plus the lively shadow of cigarette smoke: that vast, immediate, hot body touching me: the sustaining chemistries that separate it from me: plankton, grass, pears, apples, cows: steaks holding heat, the vessels of heat; lambchops, chickenwings, green peas, mushrooms, cornflakes, coffee, pecans, storers & storages of heat: the warmth on my hand, inside my hand: I wonder I dont think about it more often: transfigurations, touch: touches everything and leaves a shadow: kelp & birds & pebbles even & each individual blade of grass & outhouses & mountains & dead trees: even clear water, toward the bottom, accumulates some shadow: intimate, necessary & hardly ever mentioned: often complained of, the suns in my eyes: this burning while imprtnt theories are discussed & business goes forward: goods were shipped last Thurs via PP ASAP, CIF, & FAS: & the lemon industry: the sun, riding a moment to-moment crest: I hope it will keep on riding: its not a fixture: noticed how some nights the stars are raw & brand new? make you feel slightly uneasy? its the size & distance unwinds you, pulls you out attenuating you into nothingness till you grasp around at star-straws: anybody doesnt believe in reality should try to start a dead car on a 10-degree morning: maximum definition of detail along with assumptions of symmetry: I feel ideasas forms of beauty: I describe the form as you describe a pears shape: not idea as ideal ideas are human products, temporal & full of process: but idea as perception of form, outside form that corresponds to inner form, & inner to outer: (chaos at the bottom of things & mind: only ideas lift up from there: only groupings, saliences of similarity & difference, only clustering rises into intelligenceinstinct itself an ordering, overcoming great odds:) a few flies are still hanging around the front porch: theyre big blue: when the door opens they stir in the sun: they remember or still have the scent of the cat that was rotting behind my blue spruce: its been below freezing I dont know how many nights: I thought that was supposed to lay them but it aint laidem yit: looks like it aint agonna: we can know only so much & even explanations that hang round long as flies have a way of going off: one of these days a snows crusty freeze will drawem a line fiercer than cat scent: catch them napping at night under leaves: turn into some nap: long, rich, bluegreen dreams: beautiful, healthy looking flies, ate good, long as the cat lasted: had their day in the sunny nooks with lovely buzzes: 11 Dec: they changed the forecast today from partly sunny to mostly cloudy: not by prophecy: stuck their heads out the window & tho the instruments didnt agree reduced the gap between prophecy & existent fact: the direct yields abundance, while calculation drags upon the event: I beg that my eyes that are open be opened, that the drives, motions, intellections, symbologies, mythslift, expose me to direct sight: seeing, I color, alter, hide, accent: but what is there, naked & nonhuman? or here, deep & terrifyingly human? are we confined in an atom with fiery nucleus? is there too much room, the ego under threat of dispersion? youwho are you? how do I feel about you? do I hate it that I love to be tied to you by love? untied, wd I be free or lost? but for your own sake: who are you? can I help? is there any thing I can do: are things working out all right for you? what are those black areas? are they parts of you that cant fall into place, come into light? are they longings & fears only dreams whisper? I love you the best I know how: encounter me with belief: are you getting yours? getting & giving yours, mine, & ours, are we resolving most of the areas, are we touching on elation enough? do I love you mostly, or the thought of us together? are you hoping that giving will make up for not getting? that wd be the course of saints: get, too: get it from me: I have it and having it for you, I get mine: who are you, deeper? have I sounded you? was that bottom I struck? but oh up in the heart & around your breasts and to speak of the deep in your eyes, have I come into your measure? are you getting yours? have you been had? youve had me: I float: every cell comes to this: you are beautiful: you are just beautiful: beautiful: thank you: 11:16 a.m: a blur of light just came into the room, lived a few seconds, then died away: my crown-of-thorns, waiting, got the benefit, struck across the middle: the instruments were right in a way: emphasis distinguishes partly sunny from mostly cloudy: if it dont snow its gonna miss a good chancet: Ill say that: lagging behind the event: running to catch up: to be at the crests break, the running crest, event becoming word: anti-art & non-classical: in art, we do not run to keep up with random moments, we select & create the moment occurring forever: timelessness held at the peak of time: (just went to take a leak: jay on the back lawn, hopping, looking around, turning leaves) but this may turn back on itself, motion by motion, a continuum, held in timelessness racing with time,,,,like a napkin burnt in the ashtray, red beads, flameless, racing around, splitting, dying, turning fiber into ash: held activity: lets have faith to go ahead & see if anything will happen: maybe the tape will run out: (looks a long way off: Muse! Muse! fiery woman, what you got to tell me? tell me: I feel weak so much tape remains: my backs getting sore: I dont sleep good with this going onslept pretty good last night: woke up once into a country of dreams: wanted to remember them: but mostly cloudy was too bright, even, for them: it was a country, I think: great many people: & no news of my book at the pstffce again this morn: so I dont feel strong about things: I need plenty of help: the crusty world takes no notice: Muse, what must we do to hit the top: itd better be good: give a little, will you, please?) (Im bushed:) but you can do worse than be a singer of verses: (Im the biggest fool that ever was assertions not the way to the top, youre a little round fool to follow you off into these woods: who are you anyhow? some kind of a prickteaser?) & so & so & so & so & so & so & so & so & so so (some kinuva sans merci?) lunch: hot dogs and baked beans again: swell: 2/23: 11 a can: cheap: hotdogs run you around oh lets see: this mornings coffee & a chocolate fudge cookie: maybe 30 altogether: & all that energy turned into verse will bring you about four condemnations: transformations! metamorphoses! mitachondria! hells bells! how my back hurts: even by concentrating, I cant feel any presence to my balls: missing: wd it be masturbatory if I if I touched the area briefly just to make sure? two cool tight weights! thank you: thank you very much: if I had a flute: wdnt if be fine to see this long thin poem rise out of the waste basket: the charmed erection, stiffening, uncoiling? anyways, that wastebasket is coiled full: wonder if I should stomp in it? in & out: weaving in & out: a tapestry, looking for all the world as if it were alive: (break we that watch up) just took a ride out to the refuge: 100,000 birds: mallards, grebes, teals, herons, Canada geese & two excellent flyers from which there is no refuge: one, the short-necked, long-tailed red hawk: he browses the marshes & for the little bird, little bird he is carefully looking: & way overhead, turning, the quiet, black vulture: two avenues flesh can take: the tight red & the loose dark meat: red ambulance & black hearse, brazen reminders: and the birds fly among, regarding & regardless: the trash collectors came while I was gone & took the weeks waste away: we are purged: even a house has the incoming & outgoing energies & losses by which it is maintained: the garbage truck says on the back We aim to serve, not disturb: sophisticated assonance &&&&&&& intellections are scaffolds, trellises we wish some vine of feeling would take to & possess completely: spider build a circle hung in the squares of: bird light on & sing from the top of: we build them even for the windsongs tenuous life: chance a vine will ramble up it busting into leaves & roses, giving the robin a place & making all the air around fragrant: we build these structures because we have hope, at least: were flat & lifeless, but these erections, they have hollow spaces, room: we mean to changethat is, a sprouting is going to go on: good, bad, & indifferent are gonna clutter up all around, rise through the lattices of held space and sing all together, rose, thorn, smear of birdshit: gonna rise right up out of the ground where the dreams wait and be red & gold and laughing to beat the band: intellections are bowls we hope to fill: motions on the prowl: dont cut them down or bust them up so the water spills & the vine hunts aimlessly over the ground: do not be impatient with us: were coming along & meantime entertain yourselves with the dry beauty of our joists & timbers, slats & designs: if nothing ever breaks into leaf still we meant to encourage the vine: we like the call of the robin & his early visit & the color of his hens eggs & the way he stands on the lawn, erect dressed for a wedding: intellections have a use, dont think they dont: if the vine couldnt find a natural tree, what would become of it? if structure without life is meaningless, so is life without structure: were going to make a dense, tangled trellis so lovely & complicated that every kind of variety will find a place in it or on it: you just be surprised: & forgive us: who mean song direct & fierce: (this day ended in spite of all mostly sunny) a dark night of stars ensuing: help me: I have this & no other comfort: the song, the slight, inner unmistakable song you give me and nothing else! what are you, some kind of strumpet ? will you pull out on me? look: I have faith: I have faith: come or go: Ill always love you: I have nothing else: I have nothing else besides you: will you tear me to pieces? Ill go on without you, until you come again: then in the flare of song well make a common flame: if it aint one fantasy its anothern: where are you, reality? come out of there: you drift around in the background, drooping like a suckegg dog: probably Id like you all right if I could get up close enough to know you: are you pieces of things not quite fastened? whats your face like? frowns & bitters? witchy? scrawny? warty? withery? maybe Ive given you a horrible mask and behind that youre beautiful: or is this another dream, realitys dream? then, is reality to be free of fantasies, those I hang between us, those I cast on you? fact is, Im having this conversation with a piece of paper! and you are a figment of imagination and you have no mask & if you did no face wd be behind it: all this is just coming out of my head: the factory of fantasies: some beautiful, some terrifying, some this, some thatbut all, paper & thin air! a hundred dragons and furies, satyrs & centaursand one Muse! get food: get water: get sex: bank account, nice car, good address, retirement plan, investment portfolio, country-club membership, monogrammed shirts, summer home, cabin cruiser, big living room (furnished modern) Money Power Food Water Sexand who needs paper conversations, words revved up in a fine motion and a headful of dragons? reality, Ive got a feeling you can be awful nice! but if the only reality I can get is a spare, hard-bought one, why turn on the fantasies and let there be gorgeousness, color & motion, red & gold fabrics and fine illusioning silks! the man with bills to pay dreams with a Muse! reality is knowing what you want and how to get it: 12 Dec: clouds came in soon after dark last night, and today broke fact & prophecy as snow turning into rain: the starlings sit like rainsheds, vertical in the gray trees: two jays search the ground: as it neared midnight last night, I felt pulled to go out and hunt the roosts of birds, flush them & hear the shrieks of panic, blind beating wings: I wanted to know what birds do at night, how they handle surprise, of weasels, foxes, snakes: I wanted to know if theyre adequate to the night: I wanted to hear them settle down as I turned away, feel the sweet emptiness of their panic: yesterday at the refuge, I saw a fingerling, crosswise in a rising gulls beak, shiver at both ends: and last night, after anger & a family tiff, I suffered a loss & breakage of spirit, blankness as of plateaus: my poem turned to incontinent prose, unburned by spirit, and this occupation with a rolled strip of paper blackened to obsession, senseless, slightly mad: the Muse cleared out, leaving an empty house: but shes back with me today, I think: I hear a little voice singing under my brain, and I know shes there, modest & faithful: at the postoffice, no news: nothing is out there in the world: or its all turned to concrete: Ive won no battles & lost none: am engaging no realities: cause enough to stop & tear: cause enough to sleep today, rest my back & brain: except that song itself is enough, needs no appeals beyond itself, tightens fantasy into matter to outlast this days real concerns: soundless mist, collecting, sounding in the gutterspouts: the saliva bed sucking in my pipe, the moaning suck of a dying bird: the burry buzz of a distant, peripheral plane: the yellow, octagonal pencil, rocking as I write: the air & surface burn of cars on Tilton Rdheat kicking on & off, baseboard cracking, freezer wheezingsilence, broken by keys: * *** ***** *** * clusters! organizations! ***** ***** ***** shapes! )/(/(/)/)/(/(/)/)/( designs! close suspension of cloud: not a break or beam: the jay jumps around in the naked sumac thicket, squalls, complains, stares at a head of sumac-seed, pecks it violently, as with contempt: what a jar, moist rattle: the seed-head comes still again, indifferent: the crown-of-thorns has had so little sun, the four-flowered spike, opening, is pale pink that in an outside summer sun would be blood red: not much green on the walls of the aquarium: the snails are sluggish (!) the sky is like neon lighting, a ceiling of light without origin, no fierce disc radiant, recognizable source: equal diffusion: and when the Florentines painted radiant populations in the heavens, they were not wrong: each of us, says modern science, is radiant, tho below the visible spectrum: paradise will refine our radiance or give us better sight: were fallen now: we may be raised into knowledge & light: lower would be longer & longer wavelengths to darks undisturbed constant: may we not go there but ever & ever up singing into shining light: but not too high: theres a zone we do best in: beyond on either side, we go by instruments and artificial atmospheres: a stark way: we are, as bodies, localizations supported by barriers, holding in & shutting out: systems of exclusion, permitting certain inlets, outlets: we are held together: mineralssuch as calcium selected, refined & deposited to high purities give support: specialized tissues bind us to the bones: an outer cage protects softer organs: lovely loose mesenteries permitting digestions roil & change hold intestines in place: so the exchanges can go on, the trades in blood, lymph, food, waste, water: traffic through barriers, each selective, responsive: if you have condemned the body, you have condemned a miraculous residence temple we should try to keep the right spirit in: the aggregates! the widening accumulations, providing the molecules, proteins, triggers we need: imperfect, tho beautiful, body: when it can no longer defend, repair, growwhen mineral ash (that could not be processed away) stiffens the cell walls so they lose flexibility & effectthen the balance turns to invasion and disintegration: nothing permanent is old: what is forever has no youth or age: if you could choose, how wd you choose? the biochemist, first seeing how two molecules select each other & interlink must think he beholds a face of God: & from the center of all these balances, coordinations, allowances, integrationswaves register & float away into nothingness: there is mind: before you desecrate this place, study its architecture: but the mind doesnt insist we know all this: its commands are few: reproduce this temple before it falls: food, water: barriers! what is it, exactly, that exists when I see fish travel in water & birds in air? resemblance tying high above difference: wings, fins: air, water: 13 Dec: my book came today, Friday the 13th: woooooooooooooooooooooooo wooo wooo woooooooooooooo 6:35 pm: we went Christmas shopping at Korvettes and Cherry Hill: had dinner just now over to Somers Point at Macs: fried shrimp & Phyllis had crab: they have a good salad dressing there: dont know what it is (on the order of French) but they call it Macs: bought Aristophaness complete plays, very saxy (I hope)Id read Frogs & Clouds (no, it ws Birds) before: mostly, I walked around carrying my bk: 14 Dec: today came in an opposite way of rain turning into snow: when I woke up the gutterspouts were dripping musical flutes: the tones dangled & broke & ran together with inexhaustible variety of mood & shape: but now (10:50 a.m.) the same colorless, closed sky turns weight into fluff, fast pellets into slow blurs that touch rainpools with many-fingered hiss & melt into silence: & the grass seems to rise up & cushioning bring down the flakes: as if a god slept hereabouts and meant to make a winter of his sleep: (snow, a servant to Agathon, cloistered up with odes) soft prisons are the worst kind: bars & stones are honest, exact, but this insinuation, insisting its not itself, this deepening with universal touch: not a path, road left: only circles of melt-stain under naked trees (the flakes caught in a foliage to branches) as if the roots sent up a warmth of protest or stirred radiating summer dreams: and (its not very cold) the foliage melts & hangs rainbeads on twigs & branches points of clarity concentrating light into sources: no birds this morning: they fear these white bodies that fly into a still white starvation: a few seed, hung on weeds & grasses, fall & pepper the snow: the reason I write so much is that I cant do anything else: poem must be now close to 40 feet long: I cant get it out to write letters or postcards or anything: well if it must be onward to the end, lets get there in a hurry: or is that cheating? every time the roll turns it speeds up: as the diameter decreases, the revolutions per foot (rpf) increase, so the poem should rise to a pitch of unwinding at the end; a spinning of diameter into nothingness: exclusions: lepers on their islands, drunks imprisoned in drunkenness, the disappearances (unnoticed the streets seem always full, lively & young enough) into illness, stiff bones, strokes, graves: the silent child that stays indoors, unable to connect: I feel the bitterness of fate: I feel the bitterness of fate: what it means to drive away from the house: take a walk down the street: join the daylight worlds clean going: are we as innocent of our joy as they are of their despair? must do what we can, accept the rest: God, help us: help us: we praise Your light: give us light to do what we can with darkness: courage to celebrate Your light even while the bitterdrink is being drunk: give us the will to love those who cannot love: a touch of the dark so we can know how one, hungry for the light, can turn away: were here together: is it known, has it been determined what is right to do? give us a song sanctified by Your divinity to make us new & certain of the right: should I sacrifice myself for others? would they, alarmed, turn in confusion against me? should I care for myself only, bring to its fullest enunciation what fate says in me? were here together, though: let us know when to reach out & when to withdraw: & so & so the snow has turned to grit: I had lunch after who cannot love soup, sandwich, milk, chocolate fudge cookie, & coffee (my wifes home today)most of the week she works, while I sit home in idleness: Im waiting to hear if Cornell will give me a job: I need to work & maybe I write too much: silenced by exclusion: we dont hear the suffering: it doesnt exist and we are untroubled: prisons! constellations! shapes that possess & entangle the mind! run yourself through Beethovens Sonata Pathtique & exist like a bush! willing entrapment of cell walls & diamonds, a giving of the self over into shape, structure played upon by motion & flesh! they say there are water molecules in the void then its not empty! motions racing through, particles & drifts, a structure woven beyond the diaphanous: but here around the roots of trees, a black engendering: prisons, hold fast! safe in these cages, I sing joys that never were in any thorough jungle: but betimes & at times let me out of here: I will penetrate into the void & bring back nothingness to surround all these shapes with! closing in without closing: running through without filling: opening out with walls: run my poem through your life & it will exist in you like a protein molecule: clothes to try on, wear, abandon or keep: put away in the closet, a memory ectoplasmic with gone joys: what am I doing? what are my innermost feelings? do I know what Im doing or am I waiting for it to be done? my innermost feeling is a silky pouring of semen, a rich disturbance in the groin, broken loose, flowing free: I remember a stallion had been stalled for wks: in the lot surrounding him were mules & mares: someone let down the gate & he hit the nearest bony old mule and gave her a rapt opening, invasion & filling, & in a slick moment he was shot: as if shot, dropped to the ground and the loose wobbling weight poured & poured on the ground & he came up & took her again: she braced herself and groaned: the rich pouring of this verbal itch: I fall back: shot: winded: God, relieved, sweet floating relief: imprisoned in marvelous desire and set free! beautiful bth gng in & cmng out: the men, embarrassed, joked & hid their hard-ons against the fence: they knew the stallion stalled in the prison of his honest lust: you, find the exit, the wooly entry and go free & take an honest part in the community: many things to be accounted for, to take into account: oh this poem is long: the tapes still thick & slow: Muse, come & take my riding, rouse my riding: we got a long long way to go: present the cage men will dwell in, design the gleaming city: cars hiss on the highway: typewriter clicks: the thermostat snaps: (sounds like a motorcycle out there) the days unchangedgray undivided clouds: but the snows stopped: we went out after & we are untroubled up there: I unpacked my mother-in-laws new dishes & Phyllis helped wash them: (forbidden, their is forbidden suffering: they turn inward & inward calls hopelessly to inward: song, poor song, life them outward if you can) an object, exactly perceived & described is when entered in the tapestry somewhat compromised: part strength flows from it to its compositional environment: no tapestry without this clustering, giving up of strength: no tapestry then! if it impose what may enter! forget it! but no exact thing, either, unless it calls & calls away to kindred things: the job is honest, full as a suspected reality of tensions: to keep the object clear as it can be (& itself), the tapestry one as it can be, without tyranny: partial solutions: men feared at the end of the 19th century that they were going to solve the universe: no more need of physicists! just as the whole fell together it fell apart: innocent again, the physicists are re-employed: (Im glad somebodys working: wish I were making some money myself) @ back off there, populace! the poet will have a little room! disburden the area: hey, you: git off da stage! the poet will take a little distance on: what? can you think these private things are private? they were got from jokes & dirty books: the poet, lawsee, but sings to the general & claims but the murmur in the words: have at you, sir! the poor employee of the ruling queen, the listener to lies that they may become truth: the raiser of halcyons into storm: the public voice that has no pleading of its own: but, indeed, bends to the great, will take coins to thamusement: that will, cold as a glass, give the hag the hag, the beauty beauty, the evildoer his face: to the courts with your disgraceful shows! here the poet lolls, suckled up in the rapture of his sacred saying: a nerveless creature because all nerves: odd-one-out because he stands aside to see: fool that makes foolishness a law: will you be ruled, sir, metered out? the poet implores you to get the hell off his back: he will have room and a universe to cry all day the trampling of a weed: go you the hell all on back home: or stand off: the music descends: look up: there, now: there: thank you, gentlemen: and goodnight: its past twelve and a cold, freezing, windy night: % 15 Dec: my poem went for a ride today: I backgutted it all the way out of the typewriter, rewinding the roll: stuck it in a paper bag, then in the glove compartment: we all went to York, Pa. to visit relatives: I was reluctant to give the day to myself & not to the poem: but the thing I couldnt do was separate us: what if the house caught fire while I was gone? unh, unh: took it with me: but mightnt you have had a car accident & ruined it? mebbe but bebbe Id have ruined myself, too, past caring about poems, mebbe: took it with me: & have returned (10 pm) & reinserted & rewound: Im beat: drove there & back & drove a lot while there, looking the city over, the place my nephew goes to school & where his daddy works & shopping centers, bowling alleys & the ritzy section, mansions way up on the highest ridge overlooking: the Top: but its late: excuse me, Im tired: & the cold drops they say to 5 or 10 above tonight: 16 Dec: first I heard on the radio this morning it was 19 degrees: but its bright sunny and believe it or not therere a couple of flies out on the porch, still okay, doing fine on areas of warmth: but doing I dont know what at night: a one-legged starling was hopping around on the porch when I just drove up: and a catbird was sitting in the green-withered rhododendron bush, warming: the joy of the crest, riding & writing in the going making single stream: but I cant always live there: obstructions: frustrations: frazzling reality, many-fingered & dividing: what self-acceptance, strength of self, is needed to meet it: the gains in doing little things: but wherever you turn, someone beat you there, is in your way obstructing you: some idiot pulls out in front of you, without notice or hesitation: someone pops on his brakes: another drags along: somebody behind you blasts his horn: here, the obstructions continue: the flow lost, the crest gone: the self not pulling all together: if things were easy theyd be valueless: wd they? this is easiest when it rides highest & when its difficult nothing can be done: this fantasy: with faith, unity, I may turn it into a pleasing reality: wdnt that be a blast: wdnt that break up pragmatism: (there you go picturing yrself worldwide again: easy, boy: you dooky like everybody else) its a loss of love: I love all those people (provided they get out of my way) hostility, thrust, that drives one to this thrashing of keys: violence of vowels: prisons of hostility, gleaming as Manhattan plate-glass towers: solitudeso as not to strike! deaths the maximum-security prison: take a lot of practice to spring that one: too secure: turn our faces into cold wind & risks hard fact: I feel like running: & wd: except theres no place to run to: prisons to let ourselves into and out of: what kind of mess am I in today? Muse, if you want anything out of me, youll have to do a little fixing-up: this tape is too damn long: Ill tell you that: terrible task: then you go off & whore around: 10 pm: weve just finished addressing the Xmas cards (policy: send one to people who sent one last year with some eliminations (somebody has to make the first move:) some additions): stars, angels, snow, donkeys, trees, bells, arches, windows, children: not a bad context, though reality has a way of wandering around the edges of it: Id take a liking to it if it wasnt for still having the stamps to lick: next yr I intend to send a card to everybody I know (I think) thats not a bad context & it says a lot about peace: just went to Tonys to get a pack of cigs: its colder than you can imagine: must be around 8: yipe! 17 Dec: Sisyphus struggling with his immortal rock: some say this is all mans work, crumbling castles, decaying systemsabsurdity: but Sisyphus knew each upward strain & groan soaked into the hard potential of the stone, that the sweat burned in deep: mountaintop, he released weeks of energy and saweach time as miraclethe gravity-bound, difficult rock leap & lollop like a deer, feather-light, bird awing: & he let out a cry of joy that rang through the valley mixing with stone-thunder: the peoplewhod forgotten Sisyphus & his breadless laborscreaming jumped out of bed & ran out into the night: Sisyphus took light, jerky steps downward and resolving came, luminous with explanation, among the people: they cheered & thanked the gods for the return of reason & Sisyphus, the groans all vented from his rock turned to the empty, easy thing & rolled it like a playball over the even ground up to the bottom of the rise: the people, smiling, went to bed & through the black morning hours the rock, breaking branches, began to take on again its difficult majesty: got to leave Sissy Fuss & go pick out the Christmas tree: keep it cold in garage: so it dont turn stiff & sheddy: cutem around October: why they cutem so soon? transportation: its merchandising: dealerships to work out: farmers to contact: red tape: whatdya think? they can just appear up down here fresh two days before Christmas? sheez! some kindova nut: grows on a tree, a tree is part of Nature, Nature is beautiful & thank you for the compliment: why dont we go cut our own? cut our own! where? but we dont own that land: whatdya mean they dont care? I know theyre beautiful: grow right up in the fallow land, taper up nice, standing out half-deep in Indian grass, right out in the middle of the field: when I was a boy: or a bit more: used to go get the Christmas tree: lived way out in the country down in Carolina in a time & place that seem so long ago, everything different now & sort of loused up: an only boy & I would get the axe & follow the paths over the fields & back of the fields come into hill-woods (hickory, lush-leaved tree, covering the ground each year with thick-shelled nuts) & then into the swamp woods: for in the South cedar grows deep in the damp swampwoods and then its sparse, so sparse, where I come from: & walk & walk, roaming and nearly lost: theres one! already topped: and found another, shaggy, topped years ago: & finally finally finding one bushy, full, & pointed: climbing and with that awkward, ungrounded swing, hacking away at the trunk: dragging it home, the limbs obliging, flowing with the motion: we had no electricity but we had pinecones & colored paper & some tinsel: it was beautiful enough: it was very lovely: & its lost: though theres no returning (and shd be little desire to return) still we shd keep the threads looped tightly with past years, the fabric taut & continuous, past growing into present so present can point to future: where am I now? in a house with no acres around itdont even own an axe plenty of electricity but no hickory nuts, no rummaging the swamp for the scented green, the green-green, moist, growing right on the tree: now, a tree from somewheremaybe Vermont got by handing over two or three green pcs of paper: